Joe Manganiello Dragon Tattoo: The Ink Covering the Scars From His Mystery Illness

The True Blood alum’s new memoir Bloodlines reveals the near-fatal autoimmune battle behind the tattoo — and the 60 pounds he lost in two weeks.

By The Insider — CelebnMusic247

That enormous dragon now winding across Joe Manganiello‘s torso is not just a design choice. Per Page Six, the tattoo covers the surgical scars left by a 2016 operation in which doctors removed his large intestine — the visible end of a health fight he is only now telling in full in his new memoir, Bloodlines.

The details he has shared are staggering. Per Page Six, Manganiello lost a total of 60 pounds in the two weeks following one surgery, and he has shown graphic close-up photos of his abdomen after the follow-up procedure in which his ostomy bag was removed and what remained of his digestive tract was reconnected.

His framing of the tattoo is the part that lands. He described it, per Page Six, as “an effort to take back what little agency I felt that I had.” After years in which his body made the decisions, the dragon was a decision he made about his body.

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The memoir also revisits what the illness did to the rest of his life, including his marriage to his now ex-wife Sofía Vergara. Per Page Six, the book recounts painful moments from that period, and Vergara has responded to one passage on Instagram with a post about “narcissistic men.” Manganiello, for his part, has insisted in interviews that the book is not about the marriage. On CBS Mornings last week, per Page Six, he said the book is about the suffering he went through with the illness, and that he tried to paint everyone with an amount of grace.

He went further on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy last Wednesday, per Page Six, saying he would probably still be married to Vergara if not for the illness, and admitting he thinks about it often when he sees early photos of them together. “It’s heartbreaking when you look at these two people with life ahead of them, but for us, we didn’t know what was ahead,” he said, per Page Six. “I felt guilty for a long time.”

Today, Manganiello is engaged to Caitlin O’Connor after two years of dating, per Page Six. But Bloodlines is clearly the chapter he needed to close first — in print, and, with that dragon, in ink.

Here you can take a look at the scars he is covering with his new Dragon Tattoo. Please note the images are a bit much: